


the truth is the whole truth

by jubilantly



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Fix-It, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-11-02 09:21:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20697842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jubilantly/pseuds/jubilantly
Summary: Cosette and Valjean and Marius have a conversation; a fix-it told in retrospect.





	the truth is the whole truth

**Author's Note:**

> Posted originally [here on tumblr](https://coelenterata.tumblr.com/post/187621330125) as a response to melle93 wanting Valjean to actually tell Cosette and Marius everything; putting it on AO3 for findability.

Spring comes, and Cosette watches her new garden grow, and has her father help her or just sit with her while she works, and learns, slowly, quietly, about her past.

Not all of it – there’s parts there that she can’t remember and that are best not to remember, that feel overwhelming and sick-making when she gets too close to them, but they skim over those, skip over them, and she learns context too, learns the other perspective of things, learns her father’s past, and… and she learns about her mother, which is maybe the hardest part.

But she persists.

“Tell me something true about my mother that isn’t sad?”, she says, kneeling in her flower bed with her apron covered in crumbs of rich dark dirt, taking a break taking a breath in between pulling out weeds.

Her father looks at her, is quiet for a moment.

“Her eyes were just like yours.”

The other times she asked this question, what she got was: she loved you very much; you made her very happy. She was many good qualities, Cosette has been told too, but the good qualities only ever come around to the suffering again, which Cosette doesn’t know all about, because her father is careful if truthful in telling her, but it’s also the only thing she knows, because it’s the only thing her father knows, and it’s… it’s hard. To keep in her heart and mind, to hold in her thoughts and not have them flicker away from it.

She knows horrors, has seen what people become when they are cast out, has seen girls and women who had nothing, and she always felt sick to her stomach and alienated from them because her kind of girlhood was never anything like that, not the parts that she remembers, but she knows what the world is, vaguely; to know that it was like that for her mother is a whole other thing.

Of course, of course, she knows her father has suffered, and that too is hard to bear, because she loves him; but she knows the happy parts of his story, too, and she can make sure there are more happy parts, and that makes it easier.

It’s easier when she can do something, say something, ask the right questions and give the right answers; but there are more important things than something being easy.

I have my mother’s eyes, she thinks now, lets it start to settle, and turns back to her work.

She goes on with the weeding, and the checking on her new plants. She stands up, at some point, and walks to the bench where her father sits, and picks up, carefully, the new plants they bought that she wants to plant today.

Her father and she are quiet for a while, and it’s much more comfortable than it was right after the wedding, and Cosette goes back to her garden beds and kneels down again.

“You know,” her father says, when her back is turned to him, “I intended to only tell your husband about my past, that day after your wedding. And sever ties, and not burden your lives with… well.”

He’s still saying this about his own past, too, but Cosette’s past is especially hard to get out of him without a flood of guilt, even though it’s hers, it’s hers and should be hers.

“Well, that would have been very silly of you, and upset all of us,” says Cosette, and digs a hole in the dirt with perhaps more force than necessary.

She knows, is the thing. She knows that her father and her husband both hadn’t told her things that they were ready to tell each other even though they didn’t yet even like each other, she knows mostly it was luck that she ended up knowing, luck that she got up early and was the first to find her father standing forlorn in the leftovers of the celebration, knows, knows, and it still isn’t a pleasant thing to be told, but it also isn’t news, wasn’t news even the first time he told her, though not in these words, and she’s fine, she will be fine, she’s working on it.

“I’m sorry,” her father says, and she feels her shoulders sag, feels some of the hurt not leave but melt, turns around to look at him.

“Good,” she says, firmly but without meanness, and he nods.

Her husband, her Marius, comes into the garden not long after, the way he always does, with the slight confusion of not knowing where to step among garden tools and strawberry plants and joyful productive mess, awkwardly and a bit wonderingly, and he smiles at her, and she smiles back.

And he stands for a moment indecisive, and then he brushes dirt off the bench and sits down.

He’s no help in the garden, but her father is, so it’s really alright, and today she doesn’t need their help anyway, but she does like to have both of their company.

“What would you like for dinner,” Marius says, to her father, and she can feel that he will start to protest before he does.

“You don’t have to–”

“You didn’t have to save my life.”

“I didn’t save your life to earn anything by it.”

“And you do not have to earn this.”

“It’s only dinner,” Cosette says, over both of them, laughing in part to disperse this still ever-present tension of owing and knowing and perceived worthiness and in part because they’re both ridiculous, “Make a decision about the food, he won’t and grandfather has terrible taste.”

She meant her father, meant her father to make a decision because he has more need of choosing nice things for himself, but they both splutter.

They’ll have this conversation for a quarter of an hour at least, and it will be entertaining, but not enough to keep her plants waiting.

She leaves the two of them to it to go find her watering can, and when she comes back from that little quest, which was a quest indeed because she found the watering can inside the house, when she comes back, her father and her husband are still in conversation, though they seem to have moved on to another favourite topic now.

Marius is gesturing, tensely.

“Imagine if I hadn’t accused you of being at the barricades for, for…”

“Are we having the Conversation again,” Cosette says, trying for amused and mostly succeeding, and sits down next to Marius on the bench, where there is just enough space for her, and he makes more space, and they both turn towards her, include her.

They’ve had this conversation, in various constellations, all three of them, and Cosette and her father in the garden, and her father and Marius with the door open, and Marius and Cosette when they should have been asleep, the conversation of how many things could have prevented the first conversation from happening, wrapped around the working-through-it still.

Sometimes, too, how many ways the first conversation could have been less painful, less full of assumptions, less time-consuming and hurtful and confusing, or how it could have occurred earlier, avoided having to happen the morning after the wedding with everything being revealed and everyone being accused and Cosette having to ask many, many questions louder than she would have liked to.

It wasn’t a pleasant conversation, that first one, but it set them on the right path.

The conversations they have over and over are familiar, getting more familiar and softer, and comforting if not entirely comfortable.

If you had only answered when I alluded to, well propriety, but still, if you had asked outright, oh how easily it could have all gone wrong – they have to go through it again even though there’s no sense in what if, even though it all turned out right; they come back to it a lot, all the ways in which only luck and a certain stubbornness on Cosette’s part prevented them from a future that would have been terrible.

They come back to it a lot because they need to, need to unknot the last bits and clear up what remains.

They come back to it a lot because again: comforting if not comfortable yet.

They come back to it a lot, mostly, because it’s a miracle and because possibly they will never entirely comprehend it, all the things coming together to have her father say to both of them _I am a former convict_ and not run away and not run them off, to have Marius burst out with the accusations that would make things more clear, to have Cosette ask the right questions and demand answers stubbornly enough.

There are so, so many ways to imagine it going wrong, and Cosette knows that Marius does, knows that both her father and her husband are more anxious than her even though they would have had more control than her over most versions of the story, and she doesn’t like any of what she feels when she thinks about it, but it didn’t go wrong. Whatever dark path there is, that is not the path they took, and here and now, they are going to be happy, and there will be no more secrets, and maybe someone will make a decision about dinner before dinner has to be served.


End file.
